Microsoft Outlook users in countries including India and the United States faced disruption on Thursday and in the wee hours of Friday, with several users reporting problems accessing their email accounts,
as a widespread outage hit Microsoft’s platforms, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot and Microsoft 365.
Users reported difficulties sending and receiving emails, while others encountered delays and connectivity errors. The disruption was also reported across Microsoft’s workplace messaging platform Teams and its AI assistant Copilot.
According to Reuters, more than 130,000 incidents of users reporting problems with Outlook were recorded on the outage-tracking website Downdetector at around 1.27 pm ET on Thursday.
The actual number of affected users may vary, as Downdetector collates outage reports from multiple sources.
The outage tracker also recorded more than 46,000 reports of problems with Microsoft 365 and around 3,000 reports from users experiencing difficulties accessing Teams.
Microsoft said it was investigating the disruption.
In updates posted on social media, the company said it was aware of users “experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.”
In a subsequent update, Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load”, which was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”.
The company added that it would begin “redistributing” traffic to help balance the load and address the connectivity issues.
Microsoft also indicated that the disruption could affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in other regions.
Earlier in the day, the company had said it had “successfully restored” a disruption affecting Microsoft Teams users in North America. However, some users continued to report connectivity problems even after the announcement.
